"Then I saw the tiny fortress, Lingshi dzong, sitting on a hilltop before the great audience of the Himalayas. I stopped. And, for some reason I never quite understood, I sat down and wept. Maybe it had something to do with the starkness of the distances, with the dramatic vying of sunlight and storm. Or perhaps it was subtler, harder to explain. As if, in that ancient dzong—that speck of human proclamation sitting before the indifferent valleys and rise of the Himalayas—it was my own voice calling out into the void. I found myself making an appeal of grief about my brother, who’d had his own history, his stories, and what would happen to them now? Where do they—where do any of our stories—go?

Lingshi dzong—for centuries a way station for weary travelers and Buddhist pilgrims, a defense against Tibetan and Mongol hordes—just sat there fearlessly proclaiming its own story to the vast, empty indifference before us. A rainbow erupted from it, arching over the valley and reaching toward the mountains opposite. Such indescribable beauty. But no way to keep it."

"There aren't many books that we hand to friends, urging, 'You have to read this.' The White Mary is one of them."Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Riveting."Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"With The White Mary, journalist Kira Salak makes a stunningdebut as a novelist. This is a story whose beauty and powersweeps you along, like the jungle rivers that bear her heroineinto the heart of New Guinea in search of a vanished American."